1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system, method, and computer program product for providing advanced and fine-grained transaction administration features, along with interoperability between transactional software architectures and business entities.
2. Description of the Related Art
Distributed systems have become a standard architecture for the implementation of databases, Web servers, application servers, etc. Accesses that are made to the data stored in such systems are known as transactions. Transactions that modify data stored in server systems present certain challenges in the operations of a distributed server system. Many commercial transaction-processing systems use the two-phase commit protocol, which requires a series of messages to be exchanged between a transaction manager or coordinator and the resource managers that are defined by a voting process.
Regardless of the claimed reliability of a system, failure of the system is always a possibility. For the transaction processing to function properly in the face of a failure, the coordinator must log information to a non-volatile store (typically disk) that can be used to recover a coordinator failure. A recovering transaction is one that is reconstructed as a result of a previous failure in the processing of a transaction. In conventional systems, there is little administrative functionality for recovering transactions in the field and the little there is can only be applied at a global level to all recovering transactions. In particular, conventional systems provide little capability to monitor and administratively act on recovering transactions as well as receive notifications for related events.
Currently the only existing recovery feature of any sort is that provided by the BEA® WEBLOGIC® system, which allows for the complete abandonment of recovery after a given period of time. This period of time applies to all recovering transactions and defaults to 24 hours, which is inflexible, inappropriate and even dangerous in some situations.
As administrators grow more knowledgeable, a need arises for advanced and fine-grained transaction administration features, along with the need for interoperability between transactional software architectures and business entities.